Tuesday, July 01, 2014

where lamont cranston a.k.a the shadow a.k.a. author/artist howard chaykin talks about density, he clearly should be referring to mass. shrinking an object in the manner deduced by the shadow would actually increase its density, since the same number of atoms would now occupy a smaller volume. what would remain unchanged is the object's mass and gravity's effect on it. the ingots would weight exactly the same as they always have, which means the shadow and his cohorts shouldn't be able to handle them with just their fingers and pass them around like peanuts.

on the other hand, the shrinking machine has yet to be revealed. it's possible back in 1949 some fugitive evil nazi genius actually discovered how to warp space itself, which would allow him to shrink an object by shrinking the space between its atoms, instead of merely moving them closer together in normal space. voila! smaller ingots, same density. (same mass and weight, however.)

in any case, one wouldn't use a spectrometer to measure density. (but one can use a mass spectrometer to analyze an object's mass.) in order to measure density, one need only weight it on a scale and divide by its total volume.